


Love, This Is A Dead Language

by dannika_undomielf



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, M/M, Murphamy - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-16 18:09:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8112238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dannika_undomielf/pseuds/dannika_undomielf
Summary: (John is a dialect Bellamy is fluent in. Bellamy is the first landscape John wanted to paint.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote most of this on the steps of a museum, and then it rained, so I finished it during a train journey where a stranger judged me for the amount of pigs stickers on my laptop.

“You know I love you, right?”

They’re sitting in the home they built together (soft grey walls, basil plant thriving on the fireplace, stacked paperbacks in every corner); Bellamy stretched languidly across the couch, his glasses balanced on his nose while he reads, and John is tucked up beside him, toes in well-worn Christmas socks, fingers pulling threads as they fray at Bellamy’s knees.

John watches Bellamy blink, tips his head back just enough to catch the uncertainty before it morphs into a familiar smirk. A cocked eyebrow.

“Well, I _had_ been wondering why you stuck around.”

John has a firecracker laugh and Bellamy collects the sound, over and over, in a glass jar for safekeeping, for something bright on rainy days, so he waits, smile on his lips, jar open- but John just sighs, wrings his cold hands. Catches his bottom lip between his teeth.

It’s been years since that first night in Henrietta -narrow street full of puddles, wide sky full of stars, the two of them colliding- and now Bellamy would know John blind, just by the way his breaths come, so he shifts, an infinitesimal movement, expression soft and washed with pale light.

“What is it, love?”

John blushes, as he always does. Bellamy thumbs the rose-tint blooming on his cheeks, makes John's heart stutter. It always happens like this.

“I just- I need to know that you know.”

“I do know,” Bellamy says, which is the truth. His glasses are crooked, stubbornly off centre. “Is that all it is?”

His voice is a distant thunder rumble, gentle like Octavia says April rainfall is in Manila.

She lives there now -different time zone, her mother's language- a few miles east of the house her brother raised her in. Says the air is different, that she fits better in it, and back then Bellamy had wavered in the place between where it stung and the understanding.

(“Save any strays today, Pocahontas?” John said, blurry eyed after Bellamy held onto his hand a little too tightly.

“It’s a Sunday,” Octavia laughed, chin resting on her hands, “On Sunday’s Blake’s bake,” and Lincoln had sighed, out of focus; “-or, if the Blake is you, they _burn_ everything-”)

John leans into Bellamy’s touch, captures his brown hands in his own. Traces circles absently inside Bellamy’s palm and turns his gaze there. (John is a dialect Bellamy is fluent in. Bellamy is the first landscape John wanted to paint.)

“That’s all it is.”

But it isn’t, of course it isn’t, because John is still teaching his hands to be gentle, to be better at rehabilitation, and Bellamy was so full of love before he even knew the absence of it.

(“My life started with Octavia,” Bellamy had told him once. “Octavia made me something better.”)

It felt wrong sometimes, this love, never because of Bellamy, but because there are days where John remembers the way his knuckles bruise like ink spills, the acrid taste of the violence he was born into.   

Bellamy disentangles their hands to tap a fingertip idly to the corner of John’s mouth. “Reveal your secrets.”

John wrinkles his nose in mock disgust, laughs into the warmth of Bellamy's shoulder. He smells like rain and cinnamon and the wispy smoke from a candle Lexa sent for the new year and John loves him. Loves him so much he burns with it.

“There, _that’s_ what I was looking for.”

“You’re a dork, Bell.”

“Mhm,” Bellamy murmurs, and they sit like that, tangled like ivy vines, until Bellamy says, “Talk to me?"

John sighs, breath knotted in his sternum. Heavy. “What if I’m not- not- doing it _right?_ ”

“Doing what?”

John's lip throbs uncomfortably where he worries it. “What if I love you _wrong_.”

"Oh," Bellamy breathes, has that soft searching look in his eyes. He is always soft, with John. “I don't think it works like that. _Nunc scio quid sit amor._ "

("It's Latin," Bellamy had told him, when he'd etched the old worlds into sand with his index finger. He'd had sea salt skin that day, and something shaped like mystery in his eyes.

"What does it say?"  

" _Now I know what love is._ " Bellamy whispered, and then cursed under his breath. "John, I'm _trying_ to ask you to marry me."  

"That's a _dead language,_ " John sputtered, threw up his hands in their red woollen mittens, because he was exasperated and it was February.

"And that's _semantics_."

John had shot him an unimpressed look, "Bellamy Blake, how will I survive you?"

"Spend the rest of your life finding out?" he'd asked, and the love in John's eyes spoke for his speechless mouth. _Yes, yes, yes._ )

“How does it work, then?”

Bellamy presses his lips the tip of John's nose, the vase of his throat. “Like this.”

John sinks into him.

He thinks about how _right_ it feels to love like this, all-encompassing, fast and wild, as if Hephaestus crafted their bodies with every intention they would fit one another before they took a breath.

He thinks about the mornings Bellamy rises with the sun, yawns into yellow cups and forgets to add milk to cereal.

He thinks about how at night, he is restless until he finds Bellamy’s shadowed island beside him, and only then -bodies pressed together, heartbeat symphonies, breaths coinciding like chords- does he dream.

“I love you," Bellamy says, mouth honeyed and human. John pulls himself between the words, holds on so tight they can't slip away. “ _That's_ all there is.”

And of course it is, of course it is. It's enough to knock John off balance.

His fingers skim Bellamy's skin, discover something he doesn't have a name for.  _Of course it is._ Says, "I love you. That's all there is."  

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!  
> (Bonus points for folks who spot my nerd reference)


End file.
